CHAPTER 43
The sign is red retro font on cracked cream which says: TERLINGUA: GHOSTOWN.
Simone’s amazed they made it here at all.
Lucy’s navigated them seamlessly. Imagine, they can stay somewhere with an actual roof.
Imagine, they can sleep in a real bed. Eat real food.
Are they risking capture to do so? Maybe.
But something some people don’t realize is that doing nothing is also sometimes a risk, and often the biggest one: of complacency.
Simone stares up at the sign for a moment, her hands on her hips, thinking about the phone’s missing internet history. But she can’t ask Lucy. It’s an accusation when it could easily be a tech error.
Lucy stands right underneath the sign; it’s at least six feet off the floor. It looks from the outside like a tourist photo, Lucy leaning a slender arm against the wood.
And then she sees the writing under the sign. POPULATION 180.
One hundred and eighty people?
Simone’s mind goes into overdrive. One hundred and eighty people is – nothing. This is a ghost town. They will stick out more than they would anywhere else. It’s the worst place to have come. As difficult to hide in as the desert, but with one hundred and eighty witnesses.
She gazes down the street and she’s half amazed the police don’t swarm right for them.
The Terlingua high street is that only in name: a collection of spaced apart and squat buildings, their bottoms sandy.
A small shop built from rough stone with a hand-painted sign reading TERLINGUA TRADING COMPANY and a wraparound porch.
A motel, sign in both English and Spanish, with benches outside made from tree logs and clusters of stools and high tables sitting in the dust. A bar with proper old-fashioned saloon doors, with some sort of office above it.
High above them the skies are holiday blue, the desert sand near to white. It is a wilderness, a one-horse town.
It is no place to hide.
Simone feels frozen, first with confusion and then with indecision. Lucy led them here and, clearly, was mistaken.
‘This is …’ Simone says slowly, determined to say the right thing to Lucy, of acting with careful empathy for the traumatized brain, prone to irrationality.
‘This is a lot fucking smaller than I thought,’ Lucy agrees.
‘This place is tiny. How … how could you think it was huge?’ she asks, and it sounds like an accusation.
‘Well, sorry,’ Lucy says sharply, ‘for making a mistake.’
‘Population one hundred and eighty!’ Simone says. ‘That’s one hundred and eighty people that might hand us in.’
‘I’m sorry – I got it wrong.’
‘I mean,’ Simone says, ‘didn’t you google it?’
‘No,’ Lucy says, and Simone thinks again of the deleted history.
And the adrenaline and the ongoing poor sleep and terrible food and acute stress make Simone say it. ‘Did you want us to be found before we have a chance to get advice and contact the police on our terms?’
Lucy’s reaction ought to be one of anger, but it isn’t. She blushes deeply, blood red, a tide of it creeping up her neck. ‘Obviously not,’ she says tightly, sadly, and there’s something else there, too.
Simone stops. ‘What?’ she says softly.
‘What do you mean, what?’ Lucy snaps.
‘I mean, it would be OK if you felt that.’
‘I don’t want us to be found. I’m not fucking mental,’ Lucy says, toeing the ground. A pause, then the apology that always comes. ‘Sorry. I meant what I said. Get advice. Find the British man. And then tell the police. I thought Terlingua was bigger, that’s all.’
‘Why do you look so sad?’
Lucy flaps her arms around her. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘this.’ Her eyes to Simone’s. ‘I know you don’t believe in this plan.’
She isn’t wrong; Simone just didn’t realize she had guessed this. ‘I just … I don’t know if, when we find him, what we will … It feels a long shot, is all, to prove the kidnap. And we’re now so easy to find.’
‘Look, it’s fine. I should have googled it. I’m an idiot.’
‘We both are, then. I …’ Simone replies.
Lucy catches Simone’s eye finally. ‘If we do tell the police, what would I get?’
‘I don’t know,’ Simone says quietly.
‘Say if the kidnapper is in league with the police, the unknown guy I shot at, or your traffic cop. They could completely stitch us up.’
‘I know. Look, let’s … let’s talk about the lawyer, then the rest. We … let’s just get settled here without being seen.’ Simone looks around them. ‘Where is the place we’re staying?’
‘It’s a little out of the way,’ Lucy tells her.
In the distance, between two houses, a horse meanders.
It doesn’t have a rider, nor is it confined to any sort of paddock.
Simone watches it. They have landed straight in a western.
‘God. When people from camp came here, I – I thought it was this huge, huge town,’ Lucy says, then adds feebly: ‘They made it out to be. Maybe it is for around here.’
Simone thanks God the police think they’re in Houston; they must think nobody would be foolish enough to hide here. Maybe they’ve got time to get out of here.
‘Did the people from camp definitely come here?’ she asks and, suddenly, she lands on a fear so horrible, she can’t believe they missed it.
‘Yeah.’
‘The British man could easily know we’re in Terlingua,’ Simone says, panicking. ‘Does he know people at camp recommended it to you?’
‘No,’ Lucy says sharply, immediately. ‘He visited just once. I never even spoke to him.’
‘Who did people say he was?’
‘They didn’t. He just turned up. Maybe he knew one of the camp leaders. I don’t know … I remembered him because it was odd and sort of unexplained. Then he left.’
And the way Lucy says it, it is as though the topic is closed now, once again.
‘I think because it’s near Big Bend there will be tourists,’ Lucy says. ‘It might not be populated, but it might attract tourists. The stargazing points and all that. So there will be people to hide among.’
It’s enough to momentarily quell Simone’s panic. Yes, they are tourists. Two hikers here to walk and to camp. It isn’t so far from the truth.
‘We’ll stay a night,’ she says. They need rest and sleep and proper food. ‘Then we’ll – I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but –’
‘We’ll instruct Moody.’
‘Yes. Yes, I said yes. We’ll meet him and see what he’s like.’
They set off along the high street and Simone could not feel more conspicuous.
It’s the middle of the afternoon, no traffic, no more horses, either, but as they walk they begin to see people here and there, each one carrying with them a percentage chance that they will recognize Simone and Lucy.
Dust kicks up around them as they go, a world in some sort of old-fashioned sepia.
The windows tinted, the plants and shrubs brown, too.
The buildings have creaking wooden signs – COFFEE HERE – and frames.
There are several ranches in the distance.
A second bar, down the street there, with a red flag with a skull and crossbones on it, and what looks like a paddock outside it; maybe the horse has escaped from there.
Simone blinks. They could be in 1950. They could be in 1850.
In the distance, a man with a cowboy hat on wanders slowly.
Simone glances upwards. Lucy looks, too, at a little office they pass. It has in the window a handwritten sign that reads simply: BOUNTY HUNTER.
Their eyes meet. ‘God,’ Lucy says.
‘At least we do look a little different to the photos, even now,’ she says. Lucy’s lost water weight in her face. But she also looks suspiciously rough around the edges: the grooves of her fingernails are slightly dirtied, her hair tangled at the ends. But nobody observes as closely as mothers.
‘How do I look?’ Simone says, and she stops, Lucy scrutinizing her.
They’re standing by the side of the road, now in the shade of a motel.
It casts rectangular shadows over their eyes, and Simone is glad of them.
Funny the luxuries you miss: sunglasses, shadows, clouds, water, salt, hairbrushes. The list goes on.
‘Normal,’ Lucy says. Simone’s hair is raked back into a bobble. Her clothes aren’t really dirty. She trusts her daughter, that she doesn’t look like somebody on the run, whatever that is. ‘Well, haggard, but normal haggard.’
‘Ha, thanks.’
‘Ageing hides a lot of your sins.’
‘This is it, then,’ Simone says. ‘Let’s walk. Take me to the house.’
They step out from the shade and into the blazing sunlight. Simone looks up, checking for CCTV, and she wonders if there will be a time in the future when she doesn’t do this.
Lucy directs them along the high street and then they make their way into the suburbs. Caravans, abandoned vehicles, more horses. The roads are still wide and sandy, houses dotted up right to the dry hills, skies huge and open.
In the distance there are a handful of white domes. ‘Stargazing,’ Lucy says, catching Simone looking. ‘See? Tourists.’
‘Hmm. I don’t have a good feeling about this place.’
‘We always have the tent,’ Lucy says, but they can’t live in the tent forever. And although she thinks this, Simone still hesitates, protective of Lucy but also of their tentative two-day survival, so far. It seems crazy to change something.
‘It’s that one,’ Lucy says after half an hour, as they turn on to yet another wide, dusty street that is poorly defined, sandy at the edges, the sort of road you might find near a beach, where path and coast merge.
Lucy indicates a pink house, a bungalow, sides stained with water damage, roof cracked, though the rest of it looks in good order. A sturdy front door with no window, shutters on the windows … Simone looks at this place differently; she is looking for a bunker, a safe house.
Moody’s house. A lawyer’s house. A good place to hide, and an even better place to work out if its owner is trustworthy.
It has a wraparound porch: Simone’s always wanted to cook on one, but she won’t here. Her eyes linger on it. Oh, there’s a proper gas barbecue …
She hesitates for a moment, wondering if it’s better to leave Lucy out here alone or take her in with her, into the unknown. ‘Stay there,’ she says eventually. ‘We don’t know if someone might be in there. Better for just me to go.’
‘We said it was just you on the booking,’ Lucy agrees.
‘Do I need a code or anything?’
Lucy shakes her head. ‘Key under the mat,’ she says, and Simone winces, wondering if anything will ever feel secure enough again.
‘If somebody comes up to you, yell for me,’ she tells her daughter, and Lucy doesn’t scoff, despite the retort being easy. The streets are deserted, the houses not at all close together. There could be nobody for miles.
She merely nods instead, and Simone misses her mocking teen, this new adult, changed by circumstances and trauma. ‘It was obvious we were going to come here,’ she says suddenly to Simone. ‘The drone – it’s the nearest town to where we were.’
‘I know.’
‘So how come no one is here waiting for us?’
‘I don’t know,’ Simone lies. She wants to tell Lucy not to worry, that the police think they’re in Houston, but can’t, because it will involve telling her about her contact with Damien, something she’s not yet going to do, not until she has a concrete plan formed with him.
And even knowing this would not explain it fully.
Police must be on their way here. They just must.
‘Head in,’ Lucy says. She waves an arm. ‘I’m just – I don’t know – worrying.’ Another pause. ‘You shouldn’t use your accent.’
‘I’m no good at accents.’
‘Just pretend you’re on Friends or something,’ Lucy says, like it’s that easy.
‘They will work it out.’
‘They won’t. Loads of people have weird accents. Don’t overthink it.’
‘Fine. I’ll go in. I’ll talk American. As best I can.’
Lucy nods, then says ‘Go get ’em’ in perfect Texan.
The lodge is called Equity. The key is indeed underneath a mat that says both Welcome and Bienvenido. She inches it out, a surprisingly large silver one, weighty in her palm like it might match a period property.
She slides it into the lock, eases open the door and steps inside.